Yvo de Haas, who has a degree in mechanical engineering from Windesheim University of Applied Sciences in Zwolle, Netherlands, creates props, robots, and other objects as a hobby. Previous creations include a joystick-controlled turret from Portal, GLaDOS, and a Fallout 3-style Pip-Boy.

The latest project was a Fallout 4-style Pip-Boy that accepts a smartphone, with an LG Nexus 5 shown in the demo video, above. It also contains a (non-functioning) cassette player at the top, which take Fallout-style tapes... so unfortunately you cannot pretend that your Vault Dweller is obsessed with Thriller. This model is currently available on the website for anyone with time and access to a 3D printer. The work is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution ShareAlike, so you can use and modify the model however you like, as long as you share your alterations in a similar fashion (and assuming that you also don't violate Bethesda's trademarks in any way -- even though Haas' license permits commercial usage, Bethesda won't).

A second model (the “Accurate version”) is still in progress. This one is supposedly intended to be used with an embedded computer like a Raspberry Pi. It sounds like you will need to install a bare display and other components to make it work, but that will probably be more clear when it is published.

The X99-M WS combines the Haswell-E platform with extra certification for workstation computers, and it does so in a microATX form factor. The WS line goes through extra QA against a variety of accessories and add-in boards, which should lead to less situations where something like a user's wants to install two different video capture cards in their system, but ends up getting random blue screens.

As expected, the motherboard uses the X99 chipset, which allows Core i7 and Xeon processors with up two eighteen cores. It can accept up to 64 GB of DDR4 memory, which can be aligned in a quad-channel formation. It allows dual graphics cards from both AMD and NVIDIA, even though it has three PCIe 3.0 lanes. I assume this is because a dual-slot graphics card would cover up the third x16 bus -- this is a microATX motherboard, after all.

Beyond being a small, workstation-certified motherboard, it also has USB 3.1 (which brings 10 Gbps of bandwidth to external devices). This is obviously useful for external storage, and that has a lot of uses for workstation applications.

The ASUS X99-M is available now for $279.99 MSRP. It is currently listed on Newegg at $275.99 with a three year warranty, but I cannot find an official warranty listing from ASUS to confirm that.

Each year, Valve Software puts on a giant DOTA2 tournament where teams compete for literally millions of dollars. As of this writing, the prize pool currently sits at $17.9 million USD, which is divided between a 6.5 million USD first place prize, down to just under $54,000 USD for 13th through 16th place. Granted, these are per-team prizes, so individual players and their organizations will split the earnings from there how they see fit. It will take place between August 3rd and end with the Grand Finals on August 8th.

Last year, the event was broadcast on ESPN3. While it does not seem to be mentioned on the official website, although the online streaming WatchESPN is listed, ESPN's calendar has The International on its ESPN3 calendar for all six days. That said, you could always watch it online like you obviously watch every episode of the PC Perspective podcast. Right? Live and participating in the chat?

You can also check out an ASUS RoG contest at the JoinDOTA website. The top prize is an ROG G751 Gaming Laptop, a mouse with mousepad, and t-shirt. Second prize gets the mouse, mousepad, and t-shirt. Third and fourth place gets a different mouse (without a mousepad) and a t-shirt. Fifth place has been there, done that, but only gets a t-shirt.

Purchasing an expensive gaming peripheral is a bit daunting, especially when it (mostly) comes down to how it feels. In these cases, we cannot resort to benchmarks or any other form of objective score. Instead, we need to classify and describe the attributes of each type of keyboard, letting our readers narrow down their choices by saying, “if you like this, choose from these”.

A couple of days ago, PC Gamer published a breakdown of many types of switches, including a few different types of Alps-style brands. They have force curves for each featured switch, which is challenging to find outside of the Cherry MX brand (as few other companies publish their own that I know of). They also write a short paragraph for each switch to explain what type of use and user they are for, which (as I've said) is the metric that matters most.

For the Cherry MX switches, they have animations to show how they operate from the side, which will give you clues to how it operates. They have been floating around the internet for a while. KeyboardLover is claiming that “Lethal Squirrel” created them before 2011. These animations give a visual explanation for what linear, tactile, and clicky means, to help you imagine how these attributes feel.

Also, of course, we published our own article back in December. Our article includes our own Cherry MX switch animations. They're not quite as good quality as the other ones, but they include synchronized side-on and rear-on cycles. The animations were originally made for a Rosewill keyboard roundup back in early 2012.

A couple of sites are claiming that NVIDIA intends to replace the first-generation GeForce GTX 750 Ti with more Maxwell, in the form of the GeForce GTX 950 and/or GTX 950 Ti. The general consensus is that it will run on a cut-down GM206 chip, which is currently found in the GTX 960. I will go light on the rumored specifications because this part of the rumor is single-source, from accounts of a HWBattle page that has been deleted. But for a general ballpark of performance, the GTX 960 has a full GM206 chip while the 950(/Ti) is expected to lose about a quarter of its printed shader units.

The particularly interesting part is the power, though. As we reported, Maxwell was branded as a power-efficient version of the Kepler architecture. This led to a high-end graphics cards that could be powered by the PCIe bus. According to these rumors, the new card will require a single, 8-pin power connector on top of the 75W provided by the bus. This has one of two interesting implications that I can think of.

Either:

The 750 Ti did not sell for existing systems as well as anticipated, or

The GM206 chip just couldn't hit that power target and they didn't want to make another die

Whichever is true, it will be interesting to see how NVIDIA brands this if/when the card launches. Creating a graphics card for systems without available power rails was a novel concept and it seemed to draw attention. That said, the rumors claim they're not doing it this time... for some reason.

Quick Note: This update does not support “the original Corsair Commander”. If your system uses that internal peripheral, then you should wait for a later version.

About two weeks ago, I decided to purchase and install a Corsair H100i GTX cooler in my system. While it runs quiet and keeps temperatures decently low by default, the device supports Corsair Link to re-balance the fans and pump, as well as change the color of the LEDs in the Corsair logo. For the record, my cooler will be staying on default white, although I can see people with existing color schemes wishing to match or contrast them, and it is great that Corsair provides that functionality.

At the time, it was not compatible with Windows 10. The operating system blocked the application's attempt to run, and even pushed notifications to my desktop to let me know it can't do that, Dave... I mean Scott. I changed the file name and was able to get the system tray notification to work, but entering the windowed interface caused it to crash.

As of July 28th, Corsair released a fixed version that runs on Windows 10. Corsair Link 3.2.5676 is available from their website, but it did not seem to get much publicity. Part of this might be because, by the time the general public got a hold of Windows 10, which started the next day, Corsair already had functional software out. Still, if you were a Windows Insider and you are still waiting for a compatible version? It came out last Tuesday.

Introduction and Features

Introduction

Introducing Cyonic, a new player in the global PC power supply arena. Founded in 2013, Cyonic’s goal is to become a global brand of high performance computer parts and accessories. The business is starting off by selling power supplies and Cyonic will soon have three product lines: the AU Series (fixed cables), AUx Series (all modular cables), and the Arise Series (sold exclusively in Japan). The AU and AUx Series will both contain three models, ranging in output capacities of 450W, 550W, and 650W. In this review we will take a detailed look at the AU-450x we received for evaluation.

The new Cyonic AUx Series power supplies feature fully modular cables, quiet operation and high efficiency. And they are housed in a compact chassis that measures only 140mm (5.5”) deep. Cyonic suggests the AUx Series power supplies are “the ideal choice for office use, casual gaming, and Home Theater PCs”. Getting into the PC power supply market might seem a rather daunting task, but Cyonic has partnered with Seasonic as their OEM, which is certainly a good start.

The graphics core of new CPUs used to have issues on Linux at launch but recently this has become much less of an issue. The newly released Iris Pro on the 5770C follows this trend as you can see in the benchmarks at Phoronix. The OpenGL performance is a tiny bit slower overall on Linux, apart from OpenArena, but not enough to ruin your gaming experience. With a new kernel on the horizon and a community working with the new GPU you can expect the performance gap to narrow. Low cost gaming on a Linux machine becomes more attractive every day.

"Resulting from the What Windows 10 vs. Linux Benchmarks Would You Like To See and The Phoronix Test Suite Is Running On Windows 10, here are our first benchmarks comparing the performance of Microsoft's newly released Windows 10 Pro x64 against Fedora 22 when looking at the Intel's OpenGL driver performance across platforms."

NVIDIA SHIELD tablets which were sold over the past 12 months are being recalled by NVIDIA as there is a risk that the battery could overheat, possibly posing a fire hazard and of course proving they should never be used on a re-entry vehicle. You will need to ensure that your SHIELD is running the newest OS, if not you will need to run the tablet long enough to update as older OS versions do not report the serial number, which you need to enter if you want a free replacement from NVIDIA. Visiting www.nvidia.com/support/tabletrecall will give you the steps to request a replacement if you want one. So far there do not seem to be any reports of flaming NVIDIA users but you should probably not risk it.

"NVIDIA today announced a voluntary recall of its SHIELD 8-inch tablets that were sold between July 2014 and July 2015, which the company will replace. NVIDIA has determined that the battery in these tablets can overheat, posing a fire hazard. The recall does not affect any other NVIDIA products."

July 29th started the official roll-out of Windows 10 and, for Windows Insiders, was pretty much “Wednesday”. We already had everything of relevance by Monday on the OS side of things, and not even a security patch landed in our Windows Update queue. It was not the only thing that Microsoft launched today, though. While Visual Studio 2015 was released last week, it said that it was not compatible with pre-10240 SDKs and would delete them during the installation process and you will be unable to develop SDK apps until the one for 10240 launches on July 29th.

So, coincident with the OS release, Microsoft finally published the 10240 Windows SDK. Now, if you run Visual Studio 2015's installer, it will install the new SDK directly. You do not need to download it from a secondary source. These headers and libraries are placed in the “Windows Kits” folder of your 32-bit Program Files directory... ironically, without deleting the previous SDKs that it threatened to, when run before July 29th. Go figure.

Also, even though DirectX 12 has been in the Windows SDK for quite some time, Microsoft has, also, finally released code examples and they put them on their GitHub page. These samples teach you how to do things like draw a triangle, manage DirectX 11-era contexts alongside DirectX 12 ones in your application, and create an n-body gravity simulation. They welcome pull requests for fixes, although they might appreciate new samples as well.

Yes, PCIe soundcards are still being made and Powercolor's Devil HDX is up for review on Overclockers Club. As with most new cards this one features three OPAMPs which can can be removed and swapped with another to change the sound that is sent to your headset or speakers. On the back are a 124db rated 6.3mm headphone jack, left and right RCA jacks, Coax output, and an optical output. The daughtercard sports 5 standard analog 3.5mm jacks to give you 7.1 surround sound support if you have the speakers for it. It is about $160 so make sure you have ears that are good enough to deserve high end sound, for many users this might be a bit of overkill.

"Setup as a stand alone solution, the Devil HDX gets to play in the best of both worlds with 124dB rated performance from the parent card and the option of running 7.1 sound through the addition of the daughter card. Here is my only beef with the Devil HDX. I know these are options that add cost, but when cultivating a brand it would just add to the package."

Introduction, Packaging, and A Closer Look

Introduction

We haven’t had a chance to sit down with any racing wheels for quite some time here at PC Perspective. We have an old Genius wheel on a shelf in the back of our closet here at the office. Ryan played around with that a few years back, and that was the extent of the racing wheel usage here at home base. Josh, on the other hand, frequents driving sims with a Thrustmaster F430. I hadn’t ventured into racing sims, though I do dabble with the real thing a bit.

Today we are covering the G29, which is a PS3/PS4/PC specific model from Logitech. There is an Xbox/PC variant coming soon in the form of the G920, with will have a different (fewer) button layout and no LED RPM/shift display.

You are nowhere near as fed up with Win10 stories as you will be in a week or so sit down and get reading. So far the biggest new issue has been those who have over 512 apps in their Start menu, not inconceivable but certainly not common. Over at The Register a story has been put up covering Win10 by a person who admits to having 4,000 open browser tabs and sending the machine into hibernation in that state. Their experiences show that Win10 doesn't care and even likes this sort of abuse as long as it is on an SSD. That is not to say all is good, for there is still the technicolour yawn which is the new Start menu and the disturbing tendency for the OS to call on mom more often than Norman Bates. Read the full article to see the good, bad and bothersome.

"It's Windows 10 day. That means it's time for a completely biased and in-no-way-even-remotely-objective assessment of Windows 10."

Overview

A few years ago, we took our first look at the inexpensive 27" 1440p monitors which were starting to flood the market via eBay sellers located in Korea. These monitors proved to be immensely popular and largely credited for moving a large number of gamers past 1080p.

However, in the past few months we have seen a new trend from some of these same Korean monitor manufacturers. Just like the Seiki Pro SM40UNP 40" 4K display that we took a look at a few weeks ago, the new trend is large 4K monitors.

Built around a 42-in LG AH-IPS panel, the Wasabi Mango UHD420 is an impressive display. Inclusion of HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.2 allow you to achieve 4K at a full 60Hz and 4:4:4 color gamut. At a cost of just under $800 on Amazon, this is an incredibly appealing value.

Whether or not the UHD420 is a TV or a monitor is actually quite the tossup. The lack of a tuner
might initially lead you to believe it's not a TV. Inclusion of a DisplayPort connector, and USB 3.0 hub might make you believe it's a monitor, but it's bundled with a remote control (entirely in Korean). In reality, this display could really be used for either use case (unless you use OTA tuning), and really starts to blur the lines between a "dumb" TV and a monitor. You'll also find VESA 400x400mm mounting holes on this display for easy wall mounting.

It has been a few months since Morry's review of the Gigabyte Champion Series X99-Gaming 5P and its funky LED enhanced backplate was posted so it seems time for a second opinion from The Tech Report. The i7-5960X they used was not as forgiving as the one Morry tested, their overclocking topped out at 4.1GHz, while still decent it is a reminder that overclocking results can vary widely on similar equipment. Read their full review here for a reminder of what this board can do and see if it garnered a recommendation.

"Gigabyte's X99-Gaming 5P gives buyers a full-featured Haswell-E board with a gaming twist. We dug into its features and ran it through our testing gauntlet to figure out what makes this premium motherboard tick."

BattleTech is coming back baby! Harebrained Schemes who have successfully rebooted the Shadowrun RPG system on PC and who are in the final steps of releasing the third game in that world have just announced plans to start a new Kickstarter campaign. This time it will be a trip to the world of Battletech, the details are slim but we can expect to see both the larger view of the Battletech galaxy and the Houses that populate it as well as mech management and combat. From what Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN were told this will be turn-based, not the FPS style of the Mechwarrior series of old. No matter, this news is still exciting so keep your eyes peeled for more information.

"Harebrained Schemes is pleased to announce their return to Kickstarter this Fall to partner with backers in co-funding the creation of BATTLETECH. Jordan Weisman, the creator of BattleTech and MechWarrior, is back with the first turn-based BattleTech game for PC in over two decades."

The Stagefright media player vulnerability on Android powered Nexus devices which allowed the possibility of running remotely execute code via an MMS containing a specially crafted media file. It made headlines everywhere even though it is incredibly unlikely the bug was ever used in an attack. Regardless, you no longer need to worry as Google has crafted a patch and has released it to the carriers. You should keep an eye out this week and next for the update and if you do not see it apply you should reach out to your carrier. More at The Inquirer.

"GOOGLE HAS SAID THAT THE STAGEFRIGHT PROBLEM is well in hand, and that it rushed to sort out the Android OS jitters before anything bad happened."

The Register tried out the new Pebble Time which features a colour e-paper Gorilla glass screen for better visibility outdoors, a battery which will last a full week, waterproofing to 90' and all for a $200 price tag. With over 8000 apps for the device it offers most of the functionality of the Apple watch for a fraction of the price. Certain features it lacks such as a heart rate monitor or GPS can be added by using Smartstraps, which not only allows the watch to stay on your wrist but also adds functionality as well. The improvements were noticeable but The Register preferred last years Steel but if you are in the market for a smartwatch you might be wise to hold on as the new Pebble Time Steel is due out in the near future.

"I love what Eric Migovsky has done with the Pebble by creating an antidote to modern smartwatches. The two generations of Pebble so far have been useful, durable and practical – qualities which elude the over-specced and costly Apple and Android kit."

Killing those end of summer blues

As we approach the end of summer and the beginning of the life of Windows 10, PC Perspective and Gigabyte (along with Thermaltake and Kingston) have teamed up to bring our readers a system build guide and giveaway that is sure to get your gears turning. If you think that an X99-based system with an 8-core Intel Extreme processor, SLI graphics, 480GB SSD and 32GB of memory sounds up your alley...pay attention.

Deep in thought...

Even with the dawn of Skylake nearly upon us, there is no debate that the Haswell-E platform will continue to be the basis of the enthusiasts dream system for a long time. Lower power consumption is great, but nothing is going to top 8-cores, 16-threads and all the PCI Express lanes you could need for expansion to faster storage and accessories. With that in mind Gigabyte has partnered with PC Perspective to showcase the power of X99 and what a builder today can expect when putting together a system with a fairly high budget, but with lofty goals in mind as well.